
Abhishek Pathak
Indian filmmaker
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May 27, 2026
HCL invests in Sarvam and goes down the 5-layer AI cake
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Before we get into the specifics, can you give me a simple one-paragraph reading of what exactly is HCL doing here with this massive foreign Indian IT services company, $150 million investment into Sarvam, and why is this the right move for them? Is this the right move for them?

Abhishek PathakGUEST
Yeah, no, I think, um, um, uh, uh, the, the old IT services model as we know it, right? Where, um, you had, uh, this, this, this, this labor arbitrage, uh, game that you pl- that you've played for the last three decades, where you've got an engineer sitting out of Bangalore, Mysore, Visakhapatnam at one-sixth the cost of, um, you know, an engineer in the, in the US.

Abhishek PathakGUEST
That's certainly breaking down, right? And, and at a given point in time, the cost of tokens will definitely be, uh, converging with, uh, with, with the cost of the cheapest engineer out there.

Abhishek PathakGUEST
So AI has found, um, uh, its, its perfect product market fit, and, and that's unfortunately software engineering, right? So, um, so, so a lot of the billing that's happened or a lot of the billing that happens in IT services firms such as HCL, has been time and material-led coding revenues, right? So I deploy X amount of engineers for X amount of hours, and I kind of, you know, bill you for that.

Abhishek PathakGUEST
So, so there needs to be, uh, kind of almost a feverish urgency, um, to disrupt your own book of business, to kind of, you know, um, uh, to kind of keep looking for answers as to how does, let's say, um, you know, uh, the IT services firm of the next five years look like.

Abhishek PathakGUEST
Um, and to that effect, um, I think, um, HCL, uh, in my opinion, has kind of gone ahead or has possibly, I don't know if the news is confirmed, but they've kind of gone ahead and led this round in Sarvam, right? Um, um, and I think it's, it's, it's, it's difficult to really pin down right now the exact number or the exact dollar amount that Sarvam may contribute, let's say, two, three years out.

Abhishek PathakGUEST
But I think it's a, it's a more non- nonlinear bet around what a sovereign LLM company like Sarvam can do to HCL, right? I mean, if you look at, um, you know, uh, five, six years out, um, there's a couple of, um, sort of, you know, a key, a key areas to kind of look at.
18 MINS LATER
28:52
So, uh, have you tried to contextualize Sarvam into that cake and the opportunity that it represents?
